


That Gossamer Feeling, However Fleeting

by Catchclaw



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Banter, Caretaking, Caretaking!Geralt, Communication Is Your Friend Lads, Feelings Admission, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, hurt!Jaskier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:13:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24494830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: Jaskier'sfine, thank you for asking. Now if only Geralt would take him at his word.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 31
Kudos: 638





	That Gossamer Feeling, However Fleeting

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Crowgirl for her sharp-eyed beta, _comme toujours_!

“I’m _fine_ ,” Jaskier snaps for the eleven hundreth time. “Stop hovering over me like that. I’m in no danger of falling to pieces.”

“Aren’t you?” Geralt’s voice is bemused. “You’ve not taken two steps today without stumbling.”

“Because I’m tired, that’s all! And whose fault is that? Whose idea was it to set out at the ass crack of the morning for no fucking good reason?”

“There was a perfectly good reason. But I wouldn’t have suggested it if you’d said that you were still in pain.”

They both know what he’s going to say, so he can’t disappoint, no matter how hollow it sounds. “I’m fine!”

“You’re not.”

It’s only then that Jaskier realizes that Roach isn’t moving anymore, that the witcher, his semi-best friend and current A+ irritant, is watching him stumble past the horse with an indefatigable expression on his annoyingly handsome face. How someone can still be gorgeous while acting like such a tit is a mystery that Jaskier’s been trying to solve for six months and right now, with his body a banshee of pain and his brain stolidly refusing to acknowledge it, he’s in no position to fucking solve it. Which only pisses him off even more.

He staggers to a halt, his boots catching in the road’s pale dirt. “Why have you stopped?”

“Because we’re camping here.”

“No, we’re staying in town. You promised.”

Geralt grunts and Roach does, too. “That was before I spent the last few hours waiting for you to fall on your face.”

“That’s--! I only almost fell the one time.”

“Three,” Geralt says. He swings from the saddle in that smooth, living water way he has. The bastard. “Four if you count when you tripped over the innkeeper’s dog this morning.”

“Oh, come on,” Jaskier says. “It was laying right in front of the fucking door and it was blacker than a witch’s--!”

There’s a hand on his elbow; the same grip, Jaskier notes, as Geralt has on Roach’s reins. “I know,” Geralt says. “And you were half asleep. That’s why I didn’t count it.”

“Oh.” It feels good to lean into Geralt; it stops the ache from barking up his shins. “Well. Very sporting of you.”

Geralt’s mouth turns up, just a bit, and then they’re moving, the three of them, stepping off the path and into the warm, summer grass. “I thought so. Now come on. There’s a creek through the trees here, just over this rise.”

It’s not far, Geralt’s creek--maybe half a mile from the road, as the crow flies--but by the time the damnable thing is in sight, Jaskier isn’t so much walking as clinging to Geralt and tilting rather embarrassingly towards the ground. Embarrassing because it’s abundantly fucking clear that Geralt was right about the whole mess and Jaskier was wrong: there’s no way they would have made it another seven miles to the nearest town by the time the sun set. Jaskier would’ve have crashed in a heap long before then unless Geralt had picked him up and slung him over his horse and it isn’t _fair_ , he thinks, tears pricking at his eyes as sharply as the rocks in his boots, that Geralt should have such intimate fucking knowledge of Jaskier’s frailties. And that’s what he is, frail, a damn paper doll of a man and he always will be when compared to a witcher, especially this one who eschews people and hates pleasant conversation and favors casting threatening looks at Jaskier’s lute and how in the living shit will he ever convince Geralt that having Jaskier at his side is a good thing not just until the next town or whatever but until the proverbial end of the road, forever, and oh fuck you, tears, not _now_.

“Jaskier.” They’re not moving anymore; the sound of water is everywhere. It doesn’t mask Geralt’s alarm. “You’re crying.”

“No shit,” Jaskier says, the words sodden in his throat. “Everything hurts.”

He bobbles on his feet like a toddler--and why not? Why not put a crown on the day’s humiliation by hitting the ground head first--and then there’s steel around him, two strong arms that tuck around his body and catch.

“You stubborn ass,” Geralt says. There’s no heat in it, though. “I know it does.”

________________________  
  


He settles the bard in the dry, soft moss that sits up a small rise from the creekbank. Has to pitch him against a tree to keep him from tumbling over.

“Can I trust you to stay here while I make camp?”

Jaskier makes an odd noise that Geralt suspects is supposed to be a laugh. “Yes,” Jaskier says. “I mean, never mind that I couldn’t get away from here if I tried. Never mind that I’m pretty sure a one-legged horse could outrun me without breaking a sweat.”

“So don’t try,” Geralt says, when what he wants to say is _why would you want to get away?_ “Just sit there. Maybe close your eyes.”

“Mmm,” Jaskier says. His lids fold and more water leaks out. “I think I shall. Humiliation is much easier to bear when one doesn’t have an audience, don’t you think? Or at least when you can pretend you don’t. Plausible deniability, and all that.”

He’s doing that thing that Geralt doesn’t like: talking like he’s a jester at court. A creature made for other people’s entertainment, the kind of man about whom the ladies giggle and say _Oh, isn’t he arch_? He does this a lot when they’re around other people, acts like he’s perpetually on the stage. But as the months have slipped by, Jaskier’s forgotten it more and more often when he’s only around Geralt, the need to put on that mask. He’ll get up in the morning in a sour mood and forget to be foppish and grumble and cuss in a way that makes Geralt want to laugh. Or he’ll have a glass too many of wine after supper and lay in the bed opposite Geralt’s and hum little snippets of song, helter skelter, plucking the notes with his fingers in the cool, dark air. Or he’ll look at Geralt unguarded in the afternoon heat, squinting up at him with a nod or a grin, and Geralt will see everything that Jaskier thinks he’s so carefully hidden and he’ll have to clutch the reins tighter, tighter to stop himself from reaching down and whispering _I know, stop pretending, you say more when your mouth’s not moving_ and then doing something really foolish like laying his lips to the bard’s and taking, fuck, taking. Even now, there’s part of him that wants so badly to--

He sits back on his haunches and curls his hands into fists. “I have something that could help. A potion. Do you want it?”

A blind bob of the head. “Please.”

It’s cowslip and dandelions mashed into a bittersweet wine, probably the least powerful thing in Geralt’s arsenal. The bottle is small and slim and for him, it’s best used for silencing a headache--which is what Jaskier has, really: just a headache that’s wandered out of his head and taken up residence in the rest of his body--at Jaskier’s own invitation, mind, because the previous afternoon, he’d taken a beating from an obour that was aiming for Geralt. And Jaskier, being the idiot that he is, had actively gotten in the fucking thing’s way.

“Oy,” the bard had called from across the clearing. “You want something really nice to snack on, do you? Well, come on then, have at me. You’ll not find a good meal in that one; look how pale he is, eh? Needs more time to ripen.”

The beast had taken a step back from Geralt, its eyes flicking to Jaskier and back. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Geralt hollered. “Get out of here!”

“You dropped your sword.”

“I’m aware!”

The obour sniffed the air, its ear flaps folding back, its body coiling for another attack, and Geralt thought, no, no no--

“So pick it up!” Jaskier shouted, and then the thing was on him, its long, awful fingers wrapped around his throat and its spindly arm extended and Geralt had the sword in his hand and his blade in the creature’s back--but not until the moment after he heard Jaskier smash into a tree.

“Oh, fuck,” Jaskier had said, still breathing, still bleeding, and sometimes, blood was a good sign. “You killed it, didn’t you? Please tell me you did. Lie if you have to.”

Geralt had knelt beside him. The blade was still vibrating in his hand, the obour’s blood hot on his collar. “Don’t have to,” he said. “It’s dead. And you’re a fucking fool.”

But there hadn’t been any anger behind it. He hoped Jaskier recognized that.

“Well,” Jaskier said after a while. He’d blinked up at Geralt and stirred in the dirt. “You’re welcome.”

“I didn’t need your help.”

“Hmph. It didn’t hurt to have it though, did it?”

He’d pressed a hand to Jaskier’s chest--to keep him on the ground, he’d told himself, and not to reassure himself by feeling the pound of the bard’s heart. “It hurt you.”

“I’m fine,” Jaskier had lied for the first time of so many. “A bit black and blue, but nothing’s broken, I should think. Help me up.”

Now, as he gathers kindling for a fire, Geralt wonders why he let it go on for so long, Jaskier’s little _everything’s fine so I insist you don’t worry_ crusade. He’d known it was bullshit from the start; anybody with two eyes and a little sense would have. Jaskier was a fine playactor, but there were serious limits on talent when it came to pain, and even though no bones had snapped, the bruises on Jaskier’s back were rich and deep, and those were only the ones Geralt had seen.

He’d come close to insisting that Jaskier stay behind at the inn. Some coin, some wine, some rest and he could have easily caught up with Geralt in a day or two. Or Geralt could’ve come back for him; he would have, if Jaskier had asked him to.

But Jaskier’s greatest fear, it was clear, was that Geralt would see him as a burden, which he was; as an irritant--which he also was; as a stray that Geralt was only looking for an excuse to leave on the side of the road. It was a reasonable fear, and a couple of months ago, it might have even been grounded in truth. Geralt had come close to doing something very like that more than once; he was too old to deal with a boy like this, less a man than an overgrown child with a penchant for bounding gleefully, heedlessly into scrapes. Never mind that he was better at talking to people that Geralt had ever wished to be, that more than once his beauty had proved helpful at disarming those who tried to deny Geralt a bounty. Never mind that the mere presence of the bard seemed to bring with it goodwill, even in the unfriendliest of climes, and that goodwill only deepened when Jaskier struck a pose before a landlord’s hearth and and threw his head back and with the lute, sang.

On those nights, when Jaskier’s eyes were only for his audience, Geralt could look at him and drink his fill and see from a distance what the bard’s constant presence had a tendency to obscure: that Jaskier was beautiful--quick-witted, golden-throated, and beautiful, never more so than when he shifted from a rousing bawdy song into the first few notes of the ballad he’d composed on the way back from the Edge of the World: 

_When a humble bard  
_ _Graced a ride along  
_ _With Geralt of Rivia_ (and here the eyes of the crowd would turn towards him, and Jaskier would smile, small and secret, and keep his gaze away)  
 _Along came this song_

It was hearing his name roll from Jaskier’s mouth that had forced Geralt’s hand. True, Jaskier said his name a hundred times a day, but not like that, the way he did in front of people. It wasn’t a performance, the way his tongue and tone caressed it, but a moment of truth. This was how Jaskier would say his name if Geralt reached for him one evening when the candle burned low or while the fire was dying, a flutter of breath that would fall sweet and startled on Geralt’s face.

“Geralt?” His palms on Geralt’s sides, uncertain.

“Jaskier.” How would the bard’s name fall from his lips then, as his hands cupped that lovely, flushed face? “May I kiss you?”

“Not may, dearheart,” he imagines Jaskier would say, smiling against his mouth. “You must.”

He isn’t sure why he hasn’t done it, stretched out his hands in the dark. Oh, yes, he is. He’s been waiting for Jaskier--the impulsive, the foolish--to do it first. But all Jaskier’s done is gotten himself badly hurt trying to save Geralt’s hide for no reason because Geralt was doing fine, all right, he may have looked like he was in trouble but really, he was fine, and there was no reason for Jaskier to have a go at a pissed-off obour with no weapon and no common fucking sense and for what, eh? Geralt was _fine_ , and-- 

_You have reached for me, haven’t you? In a hundred different ways. Ah, fuck, Jas, you’ve already said it. I just couldn’t hear._

He fumbles with the flint and nearly drops it in the fire. “ _Fuck_.”

“I don’t think swearing at those sticks will make them catch any faster.”

He whips his head around and Jaskier is smiling at him. It’s a weak little thing, compared to the man’s usual grin, but it’s there.

“Maybe not,” Geralt says. “But it can’t hurt. Finish your potion.”

Jaskier looks balefully at the bottle. “Ugh. It’s disgusting.”

“But it’s helping.”

“How do you know?”

“You look a lot less like a corpse.”

Jaskier shakes his head, his dark hair catching in the bark. “How comforting you’re not, witcher. Have I ever told you that?”

He mocks up a snarl that he hopes will get him that smile again; it does. “Shut up and drink the rest of it, bard.”

Jaskier laughs, a real one this time, and tips the bottle back, and Geralt wants to say: _You’re not a burden to me. I’m not sure you ever were. Did you know that?_

But he doesn’t say it. Not now, not yet. He turns back to the fire and smiles instead.

________________________  
  
  


By the time the sun’s begun to draw the shades on the day, Jaskier feels like a new man. Or at least a man who’s reacquainted himself with a friendly distance from pain. The careful bimble down to the creek helps; feeling clean and not so parched of mouth, in fact, does fucking wonders, as does the warm embrace of the fire and the smell of whatever Geralt’s got going on the spit.

“Marvelous,” Jaskier crows, because dear gods, it’s wonderful to not feel like absolute horseshit. “That smells gorgeous, Geralt. I’m starving.”

Geralt harrumphs, but not unpleasantly. “You’ve a while to wait yet,” he says. “Why don’t you play for a while? Make sure you didn’t break the damn thing with all your faffing about.”

And it speaks to the until recently jarred nature of Jaskier’s mind that it’s only then he realizes how solicitous Geralt’s being, how not-quite-but-very-nearly-but-dare-one-say _kind_ he’s been all day. He’d spoken in complete sentences, for example, on those few occasions they’d conversed over the course of the afternoon. He’d brought Jaskier a sack of dried fruit from his pack. He’d helped Jaskier scoot round the tree every couple of hours, for fuck’s sake, to stay out of the sun and in the shade and in fact, Jaskier thinks with a jolt, not once since he’d hoisted Jaskier off his feet and hauled him into the wood had the witcher so much as raised his voice and that is, at best, damned peculiar.

Hmm.

After all, this isn’t the first time that he’s been injured in the line of pining; in the last half year, he’s been laid up by one misadventure or another three or four times by his count, at least. But usually, Geralt is the opposite of pleasant about it. Usually, in fact, he’s a dick about it: stomping about when he deigns to visit Jaskier in whatever inn or barn or abandoned hunting cabin they’re holed up in and ignoring him the rest of the time. For all his hoohah about the Path and the virtues of life on the road, Geralt gets twitchy when the world doesn’t follow his plan, especially when the world equals Jaskier when he has the absolute audacity not to be physically, mentally, or spiritually infallible like a certain judgy witcher he could name. So witchers don’t get flu or sprain their ribs or bleed everywhere when they get stabbed in the fucking arm by a cuckolded farmer: so what? Does that mean Geralt’s had carte blanche to be a) cold and b) not at all understanding? No, in Jaskier’s book it bloody well does not.

Thus this kindness is even more fucking unsettling because it’s different and also it feels wonderful and what niggles at Jaskier the most as he sits cross-legged on his bedroll, jaw definitely ajar, is the thought that whatever has mellowed Geralt out today like warm butter on a stove is a thing he’ll never see again and oh, if he lets himself linger on that thought, he’ll slip headfirst into sadness and that is not at all how he wants to spend the rest of this very odd evening at all.

So he resolves not to think about that.

No, he decides to think about practical things, concrete ones. To wit: how good supper smells (ah, it’s duck; his favorite), and how nice it is not to feel like he’s been trampled by oxen, and how lovely it is to stare at Geralt by the light of the fire and watch the lines of his body blur, their sharpness smudged by the gathering shadows. What a fool he is to love this creature, he thinks, feeling that sweet, awful pull in his heart, but what a lucky bastard to have the privilege, too; there are far worse lives to be lived than this.

“What’s wrong?” Geralt’s looking at him. Staring, actually.

“Hmm? Nothing.”

“Well, you were goggling at me like your head was vacant.” A beat. “Even more than usual.”

“Hilarious,” Jaskier says. “I’m just hungry, that’s all. You were standing in the way of the meat.”

“Oh,” Geralt says. He quirks an eyebrow. “That’s what you were looking, eh? Not me. The meat.”

Jaskier’s face grows roses because his brain is an absolute pervert, the bastard. “Er.”

“Words are not your forte today, bard.”

“So it seems.”

“Perhaps we’d both be better off if you forewent chatter this evening.” Geralt tips his chin at something just outside the fire’s light. “Why don’t you give that a try, then?”

It’s his lute, balanced on a smooth, living rock. He picks it up. It’s easier to hide his astonishment that way. “Are you saying you’d rather hear me sing than talk?”

A snort. “Yes. How hard did you hit your head, again?”

“Well, pardon my asking for clarification! You’ve bloody well never asked me to play before. As I recall, you usually take great glee in telling me to shut up.”

Geralt rolls his eyes and gives the skewered bird a twist. “Well, I’m not now,” he says. “Unless you’d rather keep arguing about it. That would be an equally effective method of wiling away the time until this bird is done.”

Jaskier’s fingers find a chord without asking his permission. They don’t need to, really; any time he wraps his fingers around the lute, it knows he’s asking for a song. The notes he strikes are sweet at first, with a baleful undertow--a sound that matches the smile he’s let bloom on his face. Because it doesn’t matter that Geralt seems determined to humor him, that this bizarre request is just another float in the witcher’s weird kindness crusade. It doesn’t matter that there’s no audience other than the newly-minted stars and the wind, the scrape of old trees against the black tent of the sky; what matters is that Geralt is here, and for now, Jaskier is happy, and he’ll take that gossamer feeling, however fleeting, to the moon and bloody well back.

He sits up a bit straighter, adjusts the fit of the lute in his lap. He says: “No, I’ll accede to your request, friend witcher. I’ll sing for our supper, since you asked.”

He sings an old, old song first, one he learned his first year at uni: a silly, spritely thing about a merchant’s daughter and the three men she won’t marry. Then the strings take him to Skellig, to a shanty he’d picked up from a particularly fetching pair of sailors. Next, a feasting song from the highlands that he remembers Geralt not especially hating; then a tune he’d written the previous week, an ode to a tumultuous night they’d spent chasing drowners (or being chased by; it made a far song, regardless), which rolls nicely into a jig he’d played the previous summer at a nobleman’s peach of a wedding, but--

“Why don’t you play the one about the sailor and the sea witch?”

Jaskier’s fingers tumble to a halt. “Excuse me?”

“That song,” Geralt says, leaning blase back from the flames as if him not only asking Jaskier to sing but asking for a specific _song_ is an everyday occurrence. “The one about the sea captain and the siren. Would you play that?”

“Er, the pirate and the mermaid? Is that the one you mean?”

“Hmm. Yes.”

“Hang on, hang on.” He’s smiling; he might be beaming, actually, because of all the oddities that the day has held, this without doubt is the best. “Are you making a request, Geralt? I usually charge a pretty coin for that.”

That gets him a look. “I’m cooking your dinner, Jaskier.”

“Fair point. We’ll say you owe me one, how’s that?”

“That’s not--”

“Shut up,” Jaskier says. “Let me play.”

The voice of the lute softens as he plucks the first few notes, and his own does, too, as he begins to sing of sweet lament:

_When pared by wind  
_ _And cut down by the rain  
_ _The blossom’s eyes still saw  
_ _And when my love slipped by  
_ _He could hear my cry  
_ _As the palm trees he passed beneath swayed_

_That my heart was his  
_ _He could not have known  
_ _For the words in my mouth were all ash  
_ _But as he left my side  
_ _I saw grief in his eye  
_ _And I knew then that he felt the same_

_Flowers in my hair  
_ _He put them there  
_ _With fingers that shook from the rain  
_ _And now my life runs dry  
_ _As my spirit flies  
_ _On the waves like the blossom’s  
_ _Eyes_

_And with my life slipped by_   
_And no strength left to cry  
It’s my own heart that I wish I had known_

“A strange choice for your first request,” Jaskier says, after the last of the song fades away. “I’d not have pegged you for a fan of the melancholy. A war song, maybe; that one about the Lioness of Cintra. That seems far more like your ilk. Since you have an ilk, apparently.”

“Melancholy?” Geralt says. “Hmm. I don’t know about that. It’s about love, after all, isn’t it? And from what I’ve seen, sometimes the best one can hope for from love is that kind of memory. The kind that hurts in a way that makes you remember the good.”

Jaskier can’t swallow the incredulous. “So you’re telling me that’s what counts as a happy ending in a witcher’s book: love that’s not acknowledged, consummated, or kept?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“What the fuck.”

“Tsk.” Geralt stirs, the silver cloud of his hair framing the sudden pierce of his eyes. “It’s beautiful, Jaskier.”

“What, your utterly depressing outlook on love and romance? I don’t think so.”

“The _song_ ,” Geralt snaps, sounding more like himself than he has all fucking day. He even throws in a bit of a glare to go with it. “I think the song’s beautiful, damn it! Why the fuck do you think I asked you to play it?”

“Of course it’s beautiful!” Jaskier spits back. “I know how to write a good song! I was trained by the best, don’t you know, long before I ever came upon you!" 

“Jaskier.”

"Frankly, I think I should be hurt by what strikes me as your willful failure to recognize my talent until now, and--”

“Jaskier!”

“I--!” It takes his mouth a moment to stop moving; another for him to gather some sort of response. “What?”

Geralt’s snarl doesn’t match his words at all. “I’m trying to pay you a compliment.”

“Yes, yes, you are, but _why_? That’s really the question now, isn’t it? Why this sudden be-nice-to-Jaskier campaign?” There’s copper in his mouth now, the taste of his confusion, and he scrambles to his feet, his fist strangling the neck of the lute. “Sweeping me off my feet wasn’t enough for you, was it? You brought me a duck for supper, for Melitele's sake! You kept me from getting sunburned! You were basically, inarguably, unavoidably nice to me all fucking day, Geralt! Gods, what the fuck is going on? Because these are not, in my not-at-all insubstantial time in your presence, behaviors in your normal repertoire!”

“No, they’re not,” Geralt says quietly. Quietly? Jaskier can’t have heard that right. “But they should be.”

And then Geralt is on his feet and Geralt is standing in front of him like a big handsome shadow and Geralt taking his lute away and then his hands are on Jaskier’s shoulders, too, careful, like he’s something Geralt very much does not want to smash.

“I was nice to you today,” Geralt says, soft and beautifully furious, “because I damn well wanted to be. I carried you off because I didn’t want to see you get a fucking concussion. I killed a duck because I know they’re your favorite. And I asked you to play that song because I like it--in no small part, I suspect, because I like you. There, is the fucking pattern apparent yet?”

“Hardly.” Meaning yes, oh yes, but-- “But you do realize that today’s been a one-off, don’t you? In all the time that I’ve known you--”

“Six months is hardly a lifetime.”

“In all the _time_ that I’ve known you,” Jaskier repeats, glaring, poking a finger into the bow of Geralt’s chest, “I think it’s fair to say that you’ve gone out of your way to make it clear you didn’t want me around.”

“But you’re here, aren’t you? Surely you can understand what that means.”

“No, not especially.”

Geralt’s eyes are brighter than the fire. “It means I want you with me, you horse’s ass.”

“Great! How fucking lovely for you! But you didn’t happen to mention that to me, did you? No, you did not. Not one single time. It’s not fair, Geralt. You can’t expect me to guess.”

Suddenly Geralt’s in his face, the tips of their noses touching. “I _know_ ,” Geralt hisses. “What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do right now?”

Jaskier knots his fists in the damp dark of Geralt’s shirt, his nails digging through to catch ribs, and if he hadn’t, if he wasn't holding on to the witcher for dear fucking life, he’d have reeled back and hit his damned head or fallen straight down to his knees--and oh, that’s a pleasant thought.

“I think you’re being an ass,” he gets out. “Actively, in all capital letters: A complete and absolute prick. There are better ways of saying _I like you_ , you know.”

And then Geralt’s hands curve over Jaskier’s hips and slide up the dusty back of his doublet and then that mouth he’s dreamed about is half an inch from his and it feels like the world as he’s known it has come to a halt, never to be the same again. Good fucking riddence.

Geralt’s voice is slow silk. “Such as?”

“Oh,” Jaskier breathes, because the brush of Geralt’s lips is a thousand prayers, answered; the way he leans into Jaskier’s touch the start of a thousand new songs. “This one, exactly. Yes.”


End file.
